Jose Mourinho was at least enthused in part after watching his Manchester United side being held at a comfortable arm’s length by Juventus in the Champions League on Tuesday evening.
The Italian side scored early and then proceeded to hold their one-goal lead for over 70 minutes at Old Trafford, with the seasoned defensive pairing of Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci making assured work of nullifying United’s attacking threat, as meagre as it may be at the moment.
After the game, Mourinho – a man who has publicly grumbled about his own lacklustre defensive options on more than one occasion in the recent past – was asked about Juve’s much-lauded back line, and his response was uncharacteristically effusive:
Mr Bonucci and Mr Chiellini could go to Harvard to give listens on central defending. Fantastic, absolutely fantastic.
It’s difficult to imagine Mourinho being quite so breezily complimentary about one of his own players, isn’t it?
Before kick-off, Bonucci summed up his entire defensive philosophy as the wont to ‘mangle strikers like they were trespassers in his own house’ – which leads Pies to believe we would be happy to part with a significant sum of money to listen to an entire semester of bone-crunching lectures on the subject.